Here's The Situation

Show of hands ... how many of you think this is the marketing playbook for reactivating customers?

Here's the situation so many of us are dealing with.

Read across the "New During Year" row. New customers went from 45,000 in 2019 to 80,000 during the peak of COVID in 2020 to 65,000 in 2021. And then? Poof. Back to where counts were ... and as so many of you are experiencing, counts are down significantly in 2023 and so far in 2024. It's only going to get harder to acquire customers in the future.

New customers peaking in 2020, still high in 2021, back to normal in 2022.

Look at twelve-month buyers. Peaking in 2021, still high in 2022, back to normal in 2023. Notice the lag there?

Look at 13-24 month buyers, your most active pool of reactivation candidates. Normal counts in 2019, 2020, 2021. Peaks in 2021-2022 as the COVID customers lapse through the file. Back to normal in 2024. The lag is a year longer here.

And so it goes. Right now all of those COVID-buyers are in the process of lapsing out of your customer file. All of the sales potential of those customers was realized in 2020-2021, still contributing in 2022, then causing declines in 2023 and bigger declines in 2024. Compare counts of 25-36 month buyers, 37-48 month buyers, and 49-60 month buyers to 2019 counts ... these areas of the reactivation pool are still vibrantly ahead of pre-COVID levels ... for now.

Here's the situation ... there is another 1-2 years of mining these large reactivation pools before the COVID-buyers are gone. Once they're gone, woo-boy, is there trouble on the horizon. You're already feeling it. This is why we care about FORECASTING SEASON! Forecasting Season helps us see what is coming, so we can do something about it before it happens.

So yes, we're going to talk about reactivation.

And no, we're not going to talk about discounts and promotions ... because that is not how you reactivate a customer.